Neutral heavy leptons and electroweak baryogenesis Original Research Article

We investigate the possibility that baryogenesis occurs during the weak phase transition in a minimal extension of the Standard Model which contains extra neutral leptons and conserves total lepton number. The necessary CP-violating phases appear in the leptonic Yukawa couplings. We compute the CP asymmetries in both the neutral and the charged lepton fluxes reflected in the unbroken phase. Using present experimental bounds on the mixing angles and Standard Model estimates for the parameters related to the scalar potential, we conclude that it seems unlikely to produce the observed baryon to entropy ratio within this kind of models. However, we comment on the possibility that the constraints on the mixings might be naturally relaxed due to small finite temperature effects.